So Much for That

  Shep was pleased to catch Zach in the kitchen, whether or not his son was pleased to be caught. The boy was so intent on disappearing himself that for a moment he froze with no acknowledgment of his parents’ entrance, as if they might walk right through him. His posture had further deteriorated. But Shep was relieved to come home and for once not start abjuring the boy that if he couldn’t chip in by doing his laundry he could at least match his own socks, or chiding the kid to please turn down the music because his mother wasn’t feeling well. (“What else is new?”) Shep couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to deliver glad tidings, and the overpriced Mountain Dew at dinner had juiced his mood.

  “Yo, I’m glad you’re underfoot, sport,” said Shep. Zach received the companionable clap on his shoulder grimly, as if withstanding a hard right punch. “We got some terrific news about your mother at Columbia-Presbyterian tonight.”

  Zach flinched. He didn’t look like a boy about to receive good news. And he protected his turkey sandwich as if they’d caught him at something naughty. The boy was scrawny and still growing; why would he act guilty about a sandwich? “So what’s up?” he asked glumly.

  Shep detailed the CAT scan results, describing the diminutions of the two cowering patches of foulness; since he omitted mention of the “stubborn” biphasic presentation altogether, he might rightly have been accused of the very rounding up he had feared from Philip Goldman. But there was nothing wrong with emphasizing the positive, especially with a sixteen-year-old kid who’d had to weather plenty dire turns of the wheel with little help from his distracted, harried father. “Uh-huh.”

  Shep kept waiting for the boy to have a reaction, until he resigned himself that this slumping, passive, unaltered will to vanish was his son’s reaction. “Maybe you don’t understand the full implications of this. It means your mother’s getting better. That the chemo is working. That we’re beating this thing.”

  “Uh-huh.” Zach raised his gaze from his favorite middle distance and looked his father in the eye. Sorrowful and pitying, the boy’s soft brown unbroken stare made Shep feel suddenly the younger of the two. Their son rotated toward Glynis, who was sitting at the table, and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder to give it a squeeze; his motions were jagged and halting, as if he were operating his arm by remote control. “That’s great, Mom,” he said leadenly. “I’m real glad things are looking up.” The gesture seemed to cost him, and he trailed exhaustedly upstairs.

  Shep was about to mumble, “What was that about?” when the phone rang. It was late for a call. He had a queer premonition that he should let it go to voice mail. He and Glynis had not had such a fine night on the town together for the last year or more, and the interruption was unwelcome. He couldn’t think of anyone to whom he wanted to speak right now besides his wife, now restored to him in all her former dryness, perception, and good humor, a miraculous resurrection courtesy of the Church of Philip Goldman. He didn’t want to burst his own champagne bubble, and the night’s magic felt fragile.

  His “hello?” was wary.

  As the call proceeded Shep said little, asking a few questions, ambling to the porch. It was still a beautiful evening—Elmsford was far enough from the city that you could see the stars—but it felt less idyllic now. He should have let the damn phone ring.

  Driving up to Berlin on what was, catastrophically, the Fourth of July weekend, Shep thought about his father. With the man’s professional devotion to more elevated matters, it had taken him years to notice that Gabriel Knacker was indeed concerned with money, which, when you kept track, consumed an astonishing proportion of the good reverend’s conversation. He’d long preached about turning off lights, not because he wanted to save the planet but because he was cheap. Back when he’d run a parish, the minister had been every bit as grasping as any CEO, shamelessly squeezing his strapped parishioners for fatter fistfuls in the offering plate in order to refit the quaint clapboard church with somewhat less quaint plumbing. In fact, the budget clash between rising costs and a dwindling congregation had dominated the majority of Sunday dinners when Shep was a kid. His father would be mortified by the inference, but in the minister’s scathing about wealthy mill owners, their second homes and sports cars, Shep had learned to detect a trace, just a trace, of ordinary envy.

  In addition to some bashes and bruises, Dad had broken his left femur. He’d been buried in a Walter Mosley novel while walking downstairs. In point of fact, the accident was of a sort that any detective fiction fan might have suffered even at a younger age, and at least it wasn’t his hip, but any broken bone at eighty was serious. Fortunately, Beryl had been around at the time. Unfortunately, her immediate ministrations had quickly drained her wading pool of Clara-Barton altruism; or, as Glynis might say, the cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain. Any further wrangling with paperwork, bills, and the logistics of a disabled elderly parent—dealing with whether Dad could go home, and if not where—was now Shep’s problem. Honestly, talking to his sister last night, you’d think she was the taxi driver who’d dropped this geezer off at the hospital and wanted somebody to cover the fare.

  He would have liked to wax sentimental. But like any sane modern-day American in the face of medical calamity, he could not afford to squander his energies on mere affection, mere concern. The costs of his father’s immediate crisis would be picked up by Medicare, but only 80 percent; Shep kicked himself for not buying his dad a supplemental Medigap policy when he’d had the chance. The greater anxiety was after the crisis had passed. In the face of a home aide’s salary or retirement community fees, it went without saying that Beryl would chip in her two cents solely in the figurative sense of the expression.

  Rising on the river shore, the austere façade of St. Anne’s hove into view, the severe vertical lines of red brick bespeaking rectitude and a stinting forbearance. With the elongated point of its left-hand steeple rising asymmetrically higher than the right, the signal Berlin landmark had always put him in mind of a prim, upright spinster brandishing her umbrella. In the context of the disheveled housing stock rising behind it, the cathedral’s haughty grandeur looked out of place. For as the town’s fortunes had foundered, the fact that it was located at the confluence of the Dead and Androscoggin rivers had grown more fitting. Berlin may not have been literally a dead end, but it was at the end of the Dead.

  Opposite St. Anne’s rose Berlin’s last standing smokestacks. Rumor had it that Fraser Paper was doomed. (God help his hometown should its survival depend on the proposed park for all-terrain vehicles. Whiny kids on whiny carts that sounded collectively like a swarm of mosquitoes: it wasn’t respectable adult salvation.) Sure, the soot-stained brick stacks of his childhood had pumped a hazy white stench into the atmosphere. Pulp workers had high rates of gut cancer and leukemia. In strictly environmental terms, maybe it was healthier for Berlin that most of the mills had closed. Still, he missed them. The poking skyline had been distinctive. During his boyhood, the fact that tourists heading for the White Mountains held their noses as they passed his hometown had been a perverse point of pride. The clattering, cavernous mills to which his classes had made awed pilgrimages in primary school had always been the real cathedrals of Berlin, New Hampshire. Besides, Shep had always appreciated coming from a place that made something tangible that you could hold and fold and write on. He didn’t care for towns whose economies were based on ephemeral “services” or elusive ingenuity like software. Shep didn’t really belong in this century, and he knew it.

  When he’d first moved to New York, Shep had felt self-conscious about hailing from the boondocks, and had taught himself to say “tuna” instead of “tuner,” “color” instead of “coluh.” He’d practiced pronouncing the r in start, the l in palm, and had learned that caught was not strictly a homonym of cot. After only a few weeks, he was ordering “milkshakes” rather than “frappes,” “sodas” rather than “tonics.” But the shame had long ago worn off. It was interesting to be
from somewhere so particular. Anyone who’d emigrated from a burg of only ten thousand souls was a scarce commodity; lots of people were from New York. He owed this bleak northerly outpost for a hardiness in cold weather. Slogging to school in three feet of snow, the driving sleet needling his cheeks and collecting in his lashes. The feeling in his feet already fading after the first two streets—how’s that for peripheral neuropathy, Glynis? Keeping his head down, brow to the wind, concentrating only on the next step and then the next … Well, the same grit instilled in his boyhood had come to his aid these last six months: how to knuckle down in the face of hardship, refrain from complaint, and hunker into a small, core, preservative self when hostile forces lambasted from the outside.

  Even at half-steam, Fraser Paper was still exuding its heady perfume. In the parking lot of Androscoggin Valley Hospital, Shep took a big lungful of acrid air: nostalgia. Faced in flat polished granite, this wasn’t the grungy Victorian hospital of the same name in which he’d had his tonsils out at ten. With an atmosphere of suffering, stringency, and boiling sheets, the original Androscoggin Valley had seemed more honest, more like a real hospital. Constructed in the 1970s, the new one had a municipal innocence about it, less like a building where they’d cut off your leg than one where they’d renew your driver’s license. Neater, cleaner, and brighter, it also seemed deceiving—like the blazing sunshine of winter mornings in New Hampshire that could look so inviting, until you stepped outdoors and were slapped in the face with a wind chill of thirty below.

  By the time he was directed to the room where his father was still sleeping off the anesthesia from surgery that morning, Shep was no longer thinking about Medicare. They’d had their disagreements, but Gabriel Knacker had always been formidable. His resonant powers of oratory had been mismatched with his modest congregation, the minister’s intense engagement with issues like world poverty and apartheid in South Africa out of sync with his parishioners’ more immediate concerns with keeping their jobs at the mills. As a father, he had wielded his judgment with the same heavy-handedness with which other dads had slapped their kids’ behinds, and the sting had lasted longer than any spanking. Shep’s greatest dread as a boy was of his father’s “disappointment.” As a one-time handyman magnate who had demoted himself to functionary in his own company, no doubt he’d become a permanent disappointment. But then, Gabe Knacker wouldn’t care if his son owned the company or worked for it. A corporate entity, if not outright wicked, was at best morally neutral, and good men doing nothing in the minister’s view was tantamount to wickedness. Arguments about how if the entire population of the Western world joined the Peace Corps we would all starve went predictably nowhere, though Shep had won grudging acknowledgment for having at least provided employment for numerous hard-up Hispanic immigrants. Considering that he couldn’t remember his father ever expressing sympathy for people of European extraction in his own country, it was a tribute that his white, American congregation had put up with the guy.

  The moment must arrive for most grown children sooner or later: a startling apprehension that a parent is old. So abiding is the authoritative imprint from childhood that this realization might commonly descend years after said parent has appeared glaringly geriatric to everyone else. Yet however routine the epiphany, it did not feel routine. Washing his hands at the disinfectant dispenser outside his father’s door presaged Shep Knacker’s first belated reckoning with the stark, objective reality of paternal decline.

  The looming figure of his boyhood took up an incongruously small amount of room on the narrow bed; maybe Shep should have tried to beef up his father’s steady diet of grilled cheese sandwiches after all. His father’s skin had a watery translucence that it had no doubt achieved years before and Shep had declined to notice; he did not enjoy noting it now. Well into his sixties, the Reverend had boasted a remarkably dark, full head of hair—which had somehow enabled his son to fail to observe that in the last decade the man had, finally, started to bald, and the wisps that remained had, finally, turned white. The hand that clutched the sheet was crinkled, spotted, and slight, and presumably this transformation of the broad, vaulting extremity once raised weekly in benediction had not happened overnight.

  Shep and his father had fought plenty—over Shep’s “spurning of higher education” and thus “wasting his fine mind,” his selling out to Mammon, his tawdry pursuit of an apostasy of an “Afterlife.” (Saving up to help the Third World poor would have been one thing; hoarding cash to kick back with pineapple drinks was quite another.) Yet the clash between generations was a battle that no self-respecting son would hope to win. Shep did not want his father to capitulate by dint of mere years on the planet, which converted stealthily from advantage to handicap while your back was turned; victory through youth alone was cheap. He did not want his father to stop being frightening, or intimidating, or infuriating, or insuperable. If he did not want his father to be old, that was only by way of saying that he did not want his father to stop being his father.

  Shep kissed the sleeping patient’s forehead lightly; against his lips, the thin skin was unnervingly mobile on the skull. He assumed a chair beside the bed. There he kept vigil for perhaps half an hour. He listened to the ragged breath, sometimes resting a hand on his father’s atrophied arm. It was a short session of the simple being-ness that he had long coveted for The Afterlife. What Glynis had called “doing nothing,” the smelling and seeing and hearing and small noticings of sheer animal presence in the world surely constituted activity of a sort, perhaps the most important kind. He wasn’t sure if his father knew he was there, and that was all right. This was a form of companionship that he’d been especially cherishing with Glynis of late: devoid of conversation, but so surprising in its contrast to being by yourself.

  Shep pulled in the drive on Mt. Forist Street; little wonder he’d felt like a hick when he first moved to New York, coming from a place that couldn’t pronounce the capital of Germany or even spell forest. As ever, the sepia-shingled, two-story colonial with a wraparound porch was confusing. It fostered a warm, cozy sensation mixed ambiguously with depression, like a gallon of golden paint contaminated with few drips of greenish umber to become a queasy hue that didn’t have a name. Hazily idealized pictures from memory clashed with the more hard-edged perception in the present that the place was growing dilapidated. The chipped cedar shingles could stand replacing. The porch railings were warped. Still, it was a solid building from 1912, with some architectural distinction in the quirky round turret that rose on the right to a third floor. His old bedroom was at the top. While it was impossible to arrange furniture properly in a small round room, that wasn’t the sort of thing that bothered a boy. He’d treasured its spiral staircase and tree-house atmosphere, the sound of the brook down the slope trickling through the curved windows. Effortlessly convinced of occupying the center of the universe, as a kid you never seemed to notice that you lived in the back of beyond.

  Beryl waved from the porch. The crochet weave of her misshapen chocolate-colored top was loose enough to expose her bra, an uncomfortably eye-catching pink. She no longer quite had the figure for those snug denim cut-offs. Then again, the days in northern New Hampshire when you could get away with shorts numbered a mere handful, and local gals were apt to drag on the hot pants the moment the thermometer edged above sixty degrees. Besides, he was in no condition himself to call the kettle fat.

  “Shepardo! I’m so relieved you’re here!” She gave him a bear hug. “You have no idea … I’ve felt so alone. God, I just keep reliving that sudden boom-boom-boom from the staircase. Didn’t sleep a wink. And I can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t been home.”

  “Yes, that was lucky.” Shep shouldered his bag inside while Beryl prattled about having done “everything she could” and being “frazzled” and “at her wit’s end”—with a two-handed clutch of her thick, curly brown hair for effect—and “really needing some relief here.” He couldn’t imagine what had been r
equired aside from calling for an ambulance and getting their father admitted, but he shouldn’t be ungrateful.

  Shep started up the stairs to drop his bag. “Oh, you should take my old room,” Beryl called. “I’m in yours.”

  He stopped. “Why’s that?”

  “You know I always wanted your room. It was the coolest. And I’m living here; you’re just visiting, right?”

  He repressed an annoyance, one that resonated with an old twinge of resentment that at eighteen Beryl had to follow her big brother to New York City, like activating a touch of rheumatism when it rained.

  Returned to the first floor, Shep took in the degree to which his sister had occupied their father’s house. Her whacky antiques from the apartment on West Nineteenth Street were crammed into every corner, cluttering what had once been an airy expanse of hardwood flooring. Film magazines and photographic equipment piddled every surface like dog pee. Her laptop computer enjoyed pride of place on the dining table, strewn with printouts. A sagging bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace in a mayonnaise jar was oblivious to the fact that their father suffered from hay fever.

  “You saw Dad?”

  “Saw is the word.” Shep collapsed on the couch. “He was still asleep. But the nurses say he seems to have come out of surgery pretty well.”

  “I know, I know. I’ve been calling, like, every half hour.”

  Shep wondered if his sister called the hospital with the same imaginary frequency with which Amelia may have called her mother. “Hey, do you have anything to drink around here? I’m beat.”

  “Well, yeah … I guess I could find something.” Beryl shuffled reluctantly to the kitchen, returning with a depleted bottle of Gallo rotgut. The glass she poured was about three sips’ worth, so he got the message. In addition to having stopped by Nancy’s next door to make sure Glynis could turn to her in an emergency, making breakfast for his wife who just happened to have cancer, boning up on New Hampshire retirement communities on the Internet in preparation for taking full responsibility for what came next, and driving the length of New England for eight hours in thick vacation traffic, he should have remembered to arrive with a couple of (unlike this one) drinkable bottles of wine, a six-pack of micro-brew, and a family-size bag of Doritos, preferably Beryl’s favorite Cool Ranch.